Rev. Kathy Nolte will bid farewell to the members and friends of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church at a reception at the church April 13 from 2 to 5 p.m., and at the 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Sunday services the next day, April 14.
She is stepping down to take a new job as assistant to the bishop of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Pastor Nolte summarized her time at Good Shepherd by saying, “I feel like I am the luckiest person in the world to have had the experience of being in this congregation, walking with them in everything we have faced. Our lives will be entwined forever, but it’s time to go.”
That “everything” included a church fire that forced the faith community to worship away from home for a year and a half, and Nolte being struck by lightning in 2012.
The lead pastor of the red brick church on Randolph Street harkened back to her childhood to put into words the spirituality that has sustained her through the joys and challenges of her time at Good Shepherd.
“I was raised a Roman Catholic,” she said, “and my grandmother was a huge influence on my spirituality. She had a clear sense of God’s presence with her all of the time.”
For example, Nolte’s mother was sick once and was in danger of dying. Nolte went to bed and had a dream in which she saw an angel at the head of her mother’s hospital bed who turned to her and said, “She’s going to be o.k.”
“I remember waking up,” Nolte recalled, “and feeling assured that my mom was going to be o.k., and she was.”
God, for the future Lutheran pastor, was not abstract concept but a very concrete presence.
A negative influence on the future Lutheran pastor was the hierarchy in the Catholic Church.
“I was born in 1955 in the days before the Second Vatican Council,’ she explained, “when girls were not allowed to serve as acolytes in the mass.”
She compared the authority given to priests, who were all male, with that given to the nuns whom she deeply respected, and that difference began to “eat away at her understanding of the Roman Catholic hierarchy,” she said.
Years later, she was serving as a lay leader at a large Lutheran church in Downers Grove where she had an experience while alone in the sanctuary one day, an experience that seemed to pull everything she had felt in the past together and at the same time opened a door into her future.
“I don’t know what you are trying to say,” she said she remembered thinking, “but I get the sense that you are telling me that I will feel this if I just work in a church.”
The woman who had all through her life been certain of God’s presence with her now was uncertain regarding where that presence was leading her.
“When I signed up for seminary and they asked me what I thought I was supposed to do,” she recalled, “I said ‘I don’t know. I’m here to figure it out.’”
When the church building at the corner of East and Randolph burned in 2018, Nolte’s congregation met for worship that first Sunday in the basement of Euclid Methodist Church. Her sermon was mostly about processing the grief they were all feeling, but she added, “I don’t know how to fix this, but you do.”
She and her congregation not only got through that time of trial, but they matured as a faith community in the process.
“The fire,” she said, “was the thing that helped us understand who we were more clearly than anything else had.”
And then the COVID pandemic hit almost the day after they returned to their own building.
“We had become so flexible and adaptable,” she said laughing, “that adapting to going virtual during the pandemic was a piece of cake.”
Nolte remembered when she was hit by lightning in 2012.
“I woke up in what appeared to be an ambulance. I could not remember my name and I realized that I did not have a good sense of feeling in my arms and legs. I remember this sense of God being right next to me in the ambulance and flippantly saying, ‘well it’s on you.’
“It was this feeling that I did not know what will be in the future, but I know you are here, and so I will be fine. From that moment when my mother was sick when I was a teenager, that has been my guiding light.”
Even though she knows that parting ways will be emotionally difficult for the congregation as well as herself, she is certain that this is the right move at the right time.
She used the metaphor of an orchestra conductor to describe what the transition will be like. She said that being a pastor is like being the conductor of an orchestra, and in her new calling, the bishop will be the conductor and she will be one of the musicians.
One of her responsibilities will be working with congregations and their pastors who “feel like things aren’t going right,” because, for example, they no longer have enough money coming in to pay the bills or there aren’t enough people at worship or, as is often the case, both.”
Rev. David John Hailey is the Pastor of First Baptist Church where Good Shepherd met for worship while their building was being restored. He said his memory of Nolte’s leadership during that challenging time bodes well for her in her new role.
“Kathy’s thoughtful leadership strengthened her congregation during a time of grief,” he said. “I’m proud to call Kathy Nolte a fellow minister of the gospel!”
“It feels like I was born for this,” Nolte said at the end of the interview. “It’s this sense of living out something that I was always meant to do, and it matches who I am to the core of my being.”
